Summary
In this chapter, you learned about the FFI, its history, and how it can be used to facilitate rapid PHP extension prototyping. You also learned that although the FFI extension should not be used to improve speed, it also serves the purpose of allowing your PHP application to directly call native C functions from an external C library. The power of this ability was demonstrated through an example that called a bubble-sort function from an external C library. This same capability can be extended to encompass any of the thousands of C libraries available, including machine learning, optical character recognition, communications, encryption; ad infinitum.
In this chapter, you acquired a deeper understanding of how PHP itself operates at the C- language level. You learned how to create and directly use C-language data structures, giving you the ability to interact, and even override, the PHP language itself. In addition, you now have an idea how to incorporate the functionality...